"for the happy, the sad, I don't want to be, another page in your diary"

Saturday, 18 April 2020

Smell The Fresh Coffee

One thing I’ve discovered in Lockdown is that I actually much prefer working from home to going into work. For a start you end up with a longer day when the commute takes less than a minute rather than an hour each way and I actually feel I’m getting more work done.

We’re missing going out in the evenings but some of our favourite pubs and some of our favourite restaurants\takeaways are delivering. Some takeaways have been closed but are now back open and we return to the Park Tandoori this week.

There are some advantages to no longer having a social life. I'm cooking every night (bar takeaway night) which means I can buy more fresh ingredients as things don't go off. I'm also really enjoying experimenting with my cooking and I’m also doing a pot of fresh coffee every day because I’ve got time to do so.

Meanwhile I’m playing more music which is actually costing me a fortune because I’m not only buying new music but also buying digital versions of stuff I’d previously only got on vinyl.

On the film front I watch The Secretary which is a 'classic' of sorts from 2002 and is about a young woman Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who is into self-mutilation and has only recently been released from a mental institution. She gets a job as secretary to the original Mr Grey (James Spader). He’s a lawyer who is demanding in many ways and their relationship takes a sadomasochistic turn but after a while it becomes unclear who is the demanding one.

My TV consumption has rather worryingly gone up during Lockdown. This is partly due to L and I getting slightly addicted to reruns of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ on the Sony Channel and we also watched Quiz, the series about Charles Ingram’s Millionaire ‘win’.

At least with all that and the various other quizzes we’re doing we may come out of lockdown more intelligent. We’re still enjoying Jay’s Quiz on a Thursday but his ‘Celebrity’ one at the weekend was a bit of a let-down.

Then there’s my Tour de France reruns. 1997 was fairly straightforward. Chris Boardman won the Prologue while Jan Ullrich won the whole thing by a massive nine minutes. 1997 was the calm before the storm of the 1998 Tour although the cycling authorities had already, sort of, admitted they had a drugs problem with EPO use by introducing a test for a rider's Hematocrit level because riders were starting to drop dead because their blood was like treacle.

No rider was allowed to race with a red blood cell count of over 50% and this rule probably explained why Bjarne Riss failed to defend his title in 1997 as he was rumoured to be mad enough to ride at levels well in excess of this when he won the previous year.

There was, at this point, no test for EPO so there was little else the cycling authorities could do but in 1998 the French Police were about to take matters into their own hands.